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The Electoral Art of War

By Charles M. Blow August 16, 2012 1:10 amAugust 16, 2012 1:10 am

Attack your opponent’s strength: that has become the fundamental rule of modern politics.

The Obama campaign has had quite a bit of success attacking Romney’s success. So much so that last week Romney jumped off the cliff of desperation and chose Paul Ryan, the Republican wonk star, Tea Party darling and boy wonder of dubious budgets, as his running mate.

This essentially shifted the campaign’s conversation from Romney’s best hope, a focus on the economy, to a worst case scenario — a didactic discussion of policy, particularly Medicare, in which Romney and Ryan (I like Ry-omney) must tell America to eat its spinach so we can grow up strong.

Having a debate about fundamentally changing Medicare during an election in which the two biggest swing states, Florida and Pennsylvania, are also among those with the greatest percentage of the elderly (17.3 and 15.4 percent, respectively)? Sounds like a campaign with a death wish.

One thing that we learned from the health care debate is that many Americans resist change, on principle, even if might benefit them, because they are afraid of it. And it’s hard for education campaigns to have an impact on an electorate conditioned to 15-second clips and satisfied with sound-bites.

Americans can have big discussions about big issues, but math and minor details are a hard combination to hang a campaign on.

So by hammering Romney on his strength, the Obama campaign forced him to make a disastrous choice for a running mate. According to a Gallup report issued on Monday, the response to the Ryan pick “is among the least positive reactions to a vice presidential choice Gallup has recorded in recent elections.” Score one for Team Obama.

But now Romney appears to be going after Obama’s strength: his likability.

And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others. This is an old game in politics; what’s different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low. His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency.

Romney continued:

Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like.

That was a reference to an unfortunate comment Vice President Joe Biden made to a largely black audience in Virginia. Biden said:

Romney wants to let the — he said the first 100 days — he’s gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. He gonna put y’all back in chains.

Some have suggested that Biden’s comment was a reference to slavery. If it was, I’m not a fan of such references. But it’s hardly the place of the Republicans to object now, given that they said nothing when one of their primary candidates, Herman Cain, stewed in slavery metaphors. Cain was fond of saying that he had left the “Democrat plantation.” In one speech, Cain said, about being a black conservative, “I tell some of my callers: It may shock you, but some black people can think for themselves.” In an ad, Cain said: “our tax code is the 21st century version of slavery.”

I don’t recall Republicans complaining then. In fact, Cain even led in the polls for a while. This feels hypocritical.

We should have seen Romney’s new tack coming, because he began hinting at it last week. As NBC News reported Friday, Romney “said in the interview he would like a pledge (of sorts) with Obama that there be no ‘personal’ attack ads”:

Our campaign would be helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature.

Question: Is Romney really saying that scrutinizing his business record — which he has held up as one of his chief qualifications to be president — is personal? But we digress.

He continued: “We only talk about issues. And we can talk about the differences between our positions and our opponent’s position.”

Of his own campaign, Romney said:

Our ads haven’t gone after the president personally.… We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.

The Romney campaign’s special pleading for substance and civility is strange given that the super PACs supporting it drowned his primary opponents in negative ads.

At the time, Romney’s take on negative advertising was clear: “If you can’t stand the relatively modest heat in the kitchen right now wait until Obama’s hell’s kitchen shows up.”

Well, it has shown up and it has worked just like Romney’s did then. Now he’s whining that Obama is winning.

So far the Obama campaign has simply outsmarted the Romney campaign in the electoral art of war. This change in strategy is just Romney’s most recent attempt to regain his footing: trying to paint a likable president as a hateful one.

Good luck with that.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.